


Mission Parameters

by BethCGPhoenix



Category: Quantum Leap
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:24:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BethCGPhoenix/pseuds/BethCGPhoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-MIA/The Leap Home. Al's dealing just fine, thank you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mission Parameters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [grey_sw (grey)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grey/gifts).



> Many thanks to ishie for the beta, especially on such short notice! (I mean, of...course I finished well in advance of the Yuletide deadline. Yeah. That's it. &gt;_&gt;)

Not like Al ever needed an excuse, but he definitely didn't need one now. Or so he would assert between the third shot of whiskey and the fourth, or between the sheets with some redhead with an _amazing_ tongue and legs up to there.

Not like anyone would ask, either, but he had the party line of a cheery grin and _what, I couldn't take a night off?_ all ready to go, just in case.

Yeah. Wasn't that the truth.

But hey, at least if it was true, nobody would think he was lying, least of all himself.

* * *

 

"Good morning, Admiral," said Ziggy as Al walked -- well, shambled, but it was just because he had on a bad pair of shoes -- into Project Headquarters. A slight pause divided the air before she went on, "I am detecting an increase in blood pressure, dilated pupils, and dehydration. Would dimming the lights help the hangover?"

Al squinted up at the blue orb suspended from the ceiling. "Who said I had a hangover?" he asked, fishing a fresh cigar out of his breast pocket.

"I was referring to the biometrics on our latest arrival, Admiral."

He paused, the cigar's end pinched between a triangle of three fingers. "Right, yeah, of course you were," he muttered, and retrieved a cigar cutter from his other pocket.

"If you would prefer I dim the lights in here as well -- "

"Nah, don't worry about it, it's not that bad." He directed a rakish grin to the same spot. "And even if it was, oh _boy_ was it worth it. You got any other stats on the new guy?"

"Only what I have already indicated." Al lit his cigar; she went on, "He also seems to be drifting in and out of consciousness."

"Sounds like he had a good night, too," Al decided. He described a thick line of smoke through the air as he waved his cigar. "Yeah, dim the lights for the poor kid, I'll come back and talk to him once he's slept it off a little. I'm gonna go check up on Sam."

* * *

 

" -- and I don't _ever_ want to see another letter from that address in this house again, do you hear me?" an elderly woman was bawling as Al opened the Imaging Chamber door. Sam -- or the man Sam had leaped into this go-around, an equally elderly gentleman with thinning hair and a bit of a paunch -- looked about how Al felt at the moment: he was blinking up at the woman as if she were a time bomb he'd been holding, certain he'd snipped the right wire, only to discover they'd switched up the color coding on him at the last minute.

All right, so maybe that made Sam a lot more confused than hungover. They could go hand-in-hand sometimes.

"Trouble in paradise? I can come back later," he quipped, which earned him a baleful glare. The woman mistook its direction.

"And don't you _dare_ give me that look, Joel!" she snapped, flinging the letters in his face. "You're the one who lied to me about it!"

"Yeah, I'll come back later," Al decided, and started to punch a few buttons on the handlink.

"Don't you _dare,_" Sam hissed to him.

"That's what I said!" The woman glowered, then spun on her heel and marched out of the room. "No more contact with her or I'm throwing your clothes on the lawn!"

The resounding bang of a slamming door echoed through the room. Slowly, Sam lowered his head back onto the couch with a groan; the groan soon trailed into viable words.

"Why am I here?" he asked.

Al didn't answer right away; he was too busy looking after the woman and letting out a long, low, and somewhat impressed whistle. "And I thought my -- " A corner of his mind stuttered like a stubbed toe, pushing itself outward into his voice. He caught himself and went on smoothly, "Third wife had a temper."

"Al."

Impatience, annoyance -- but no sign that Sam had noticed. Good. The handlink squawked as Al stabbed a few more buttons with one finger, double-checking what he'd already suspected: Joel Whatshisname had yet to wake up, and Ziggy didn't have squat besides his most recent vitals, which...well, _those_ looked like Al felt, without a doubt.

"That's...a good question," he said, stretching the first word into a long, hedging line. Sam's borrowed mouth set into a frustrated edge; Al went on, hastily, "It's not our fault, the guy's out cold! Sounds like he partied like hell last night, I thought _my_ hangover was bad this morning. Jeez. At least I'm awake and...oh, stop it," he finished with a glare of his own. "You're giving me that look, that...stern choir-boy look."

Inwardly, he braced himself for what he hoped wouldn't follow. _Drinking's no way to deal with it, Al._ Or, _You couldn't have coped with seeing Beth again some way that didn't involve you being incapacitated the next morning?_ Both of which would be better than the last option: an apology, either for not being able to tell Beth the truth or for not dragging him out of the VC's hands when they crossed paths in 1970.

He didn't get any of those. Just a sigh, loud and long and exasperated, and a slow uncoiling in his own gut like he was the one letting out all that air and sagging into a threadbare couch.

"At least I'm here, aren't I?" demanded Al.

"Yeah, you're here," Sam grumbled, scrubbing a hand over his face before he heaved himself to his feet. It had a disconcerting incongruity that even after so many leaps, Al couldn't quite get used to: the sight of a much larger man moving like a much smaller one, skewing his vision sideways a little like he was still kind of drunk. He shook his head to clear it as Sam went on, "Look, just -- tell me as soon as you know anything?"

It was Al's turn to be almost Saharan in tone, and to ignore the irony of what followed. "When have I not?"

Sam sighed. "Yeah, I know. Sorry, I just -- " A small, helpless gesture toward the front door. "Almost wish I'd been greeted by a saber-tooth tiger compared to that."

"Them's the breaks, kid," said Al, and tapped out two more buttons to open a swatch of light behind himself. As he started to step through, Sam turned back to him.

"Al?"

"Hm?"

He didn't like that look, either. There was way too much concern in that look. "You okay?"

Al faltered his way into a shrug. "Yeah, why wouldn't I be?"

Sam frowned. To Al's relief, it seemed like a genuinely puzzled frown, distant, like someone working to recall a memory. "I don't know," he answered honestly. "I've just...got this feeling."

Al quirked a smile, as dashing as he could make it. "Maybe the hangover's contagious," he said, and sent the door sliding down before Sam could say anything else.

He didn't remember. Al guessed that had to be a good thing. He hoped.

* * *

 

Neither of them had to wait very long. Whether _that_ was a good thing or a bad thing depended on who you asked: to Al, it was definitely a plus. To the kid who had to clean up after their new arrival when he came around and promptly yakked all over the floor? Yeah, that guy probably wished he'd gone and gotten himself a nice posting out in Annapolis somewhere.

Al's nose twitched when he walked into the Waiting Room not long after; the whole place still reeked of antiseptic and bile. The half-sick, half-terrified groans from Joel Whatshisname didn't do much to stop his ears from twitching, either. Al's own condition must've given him an extra dose of sympathy for the poor guy; he all but tiptoed his way to the Waiting Room table with a plastic cup in hand.

"Want some water?" he asked, pitching his voice low as he held out the glass.

Joel cracked open one of Sam Beckett's eyes. He didn't answer. Al went on, "It's not poison. Come on, I've got aspirin, too, want that instead? 'Cause if you don't I think I might go ahead and take it myself, I've got a headache of my own like you would not believe."

"Who're you?"

_Here we go._ Al sighed inwardly. At least he knew the script by heart by now. "My name's Al," he said. "What's yours?"

Joel did his level best to sit up on the table, swaying a little and loosing another groan. "Winters," he croaked in Sam's voice. "It's Joel Winters." He blinked around the room. "How drunk was I last night?"

Okay. Winters. That was good; that gave them something to work with. As for the rest, all Al could do was pull his lips back in an apologetic wince and shake his head. "Afraid I wouldn't be able to tell you that part," he said. "And the stuff I could tell you -- "

He broke off mid-sentence. Really, all you had to do was look at the guy. Even if he was conscious, he was only holding on by a couple of hairs and a headache that made it too much trouble to conk out again. It's not like he was in any shape to get the news, even just an abbreviated version of it.

So Al continued, with a cheer so false it made his own teeth ache, "You know what, let's hold off on that until you take the aspirin, all right?"

Joel grunted. In assent, apparently, because soon after he held out both hands, one to the water glass and the other to the small single-dose packet of Bayer that Al was palming.

Then, as Al deposited them into his waiting fingers, Joel squinted up at him through a fog of piecemeal memories and asked, "Have you heard anything from Annabelle?"

Huh. Another name: also good. Al cocked his head in mock thought, stayed there for a full second, then said, "You know, I'm not sure. Annabelle's your -- " A not-so-blind stab in the dark. "Wife, right?"

"Um." The tips of Joel's borrowed ears turned pink. "Not exactly," he muttered. "It's just -- some girl I know, that's it."

Al didn't have to calculate that next second's long pause. He drew back his hands.

"Yeah, that name's not ringing a bell," he said at last. He forced another smile. "Tell you what, though, I'll go check, and we'll let you know if she's been asking for you."

Only half-hearing Joel's muttered response, he ducked out of the Waiting Room and went straight for his handlink.

* * *

 

When Ziggy ran the necessary data through her mainframe and cross-referenced it with enough archive material to produce a result, they still didn't have any data on an Annabelle that might have gone skating through Joel Winters' life, past, present, or future. What they did have was a ninety-five point six percent probability on what Sam was there to do.

"Your name's Joel Winters, age sixty-two, you're a retired firefighter, and about twenty years ago you shaved..." Al frowned and gave the handlink a solid whack against his palm; it squealed in protest before blinking the data back into alignment. "_Saved_ the lives of about ten women who fell victim to a spate of arson attacks across the county. Your work -- oh, and later your testimony at the trial, that's good -- put one Christopher Marsh behind bars, but it looks like the guy's about to get out on parole in..."

He smacked the handlink again. Despite its indignant squawk, the information didn't change. Sam, arms folded, craned his neck to try to read over Al's shoulder.

"What?" he asked.

"About to get out on parole two days ago," finished Al at a sullen mutter, dropping the handlink back to his side. Addressing the ceiling: "Thanks, that's a _real_ big help."

Before either Gooshie or Ziggy could respond to his sarcastic comment, Sam broke in. "So he's already been released?"

"Yeah, and according to Ziggy -- " a break as he tapped his way over the lights of the handlink -- "he's set to strike again within the next thirty-six hours."

"Does Ziggy know where yet?"

Al shook his head, taking a drag from his cigar. "We're still working on that part. There's, I don't know, some data corruption to contend with it sounds like, we're talking to Washington and trying to devise a workaround."

"All right, so -- " Sam had begun to pace back and forth over the living room rug, gesturing to catch his thoughts and pin them down as they went by. "My best bet's to find out as much about Christopher Marsh as I can and stick by him for the next day and a half until we're in the clear."

Al put in, "And possibly keep your marriage from dissolving in the process."

Sam stopped mid-step. "Wait, what?"

"Well," and Al drew a loop of smoke with the cigar, "that's the other probability Ziggy came up with. There's a sixty-four point three percent chance you're here to keep Joel and Marian -- that's his wife -- from splitting up."

Frowning, Sam rubbed the back of his neck. "Is this about the correspondence?"

"The corresp -- " Al interrupted himself, pointing to Sam with the cigar. "You mean the letters the missus was so upset about." It dawned on him. "Sam, they weren't addressed to an Annabelle, were they?"

"Yeah, actually," murmured Sam, one hand still to the back of his chubby neck, absorbed in thought. "They were."

_That dirty dog._ He chomped down a little harder on the end of the cigar.

Sam noticed. "Why, do you think that means something?"

"I don't know, but I'm gonna find out," said Al, and opened the Imaging Chamber door.

* * *

 

He didn't learn anything from Joel himself; apparently once the aspirin kicked in, he'd gone back to trying to sleep off the hangover. Al figured that was probably for the best. If he'd gotten in the same room as Mister I Saved People's Lives Back in My Day I Can Do Whatever I Want right then, he probably would've popped him one right in the --

But that hadn't happened. So it didn't matter.

Besides, he caught a glimpse of the archival video shot a couple hours earlier instead -- the one with Verbeena talking Joel through the standard psychological evaluation -- and that was more than enough.

_Come on, it's just a bunch of letters,_ he said at one point after they got on the subject of the mysterious Annabelle -- and dammit, did Al wish right then that the camera could puncture that aura of Sam Beckett Joel was prancing around in. _There's no harm in that._

"Bullshit," Al muttered, and shut off the screen.

* * *

 

"Al, I don't think keeping Joel and his wife together is as big a factor as Ziggy said it was," Sam said, and it was all Al could do not to punch the handlink and leave him there without another word.

"What?" he asked instead, a little tighter than he intended. (Good thing he had the cigar in his mouth. It was hard to talk in anything _but_ a tight voice with your teeth clamped down like that.) "Sixty-four point three percent isn't good enough for you?"

"Not when you put it up against ninety-five point six percent and rising -- Al," Sam shot back, "when has a leap ever worked like that? Either I'm here to do one thing or I'm here to do the other."

"Not this time." Al wasn't a big fan of his own voice sounded right then, full of a cold and distant steeliness that he _knew_ would tip Sam off if he was paying any kind of attention. Which he was.

Right on cue, in fact, Sam wheeled on him and said, "Ask Ziggy to run the odds that I'm here to do both."

His hand fisted, convulsively. The handlink squawked as loud as if he'd struck it; Al looked down, absorbed by the lights for a moment, then lifted his hand like he was pulling a two-ton weight by his wrist and calculated the odds.

"Thirty-eight percent even," he muttered once the handlink had beeped its way to a result.

"See?" Sam thrust out both hands toward him. "I'm telling you, Al, I've got to focus on Christopher here, and besides, just from reading the letters -- "

Al's eyes narrowed. "Yeah, what about them?"

Sam hesitated, cut short for an instant by the look on Al's face. Quieter, "I think he really does love her. Is that something we ought to be interfering with? Even if it does mean he leaves his wife?"

Throughout Sam's abbreviated speech, Al could feel his mouth thinning to match the slits of his eyes. _He doesn't remember,_ he reminded himself. _He doesn't remember, and you're sure as hell not going to be the one who reminds him. It's done, it's over with, he did everything he could -- _

"We've all got to play by the rules here, Sam," he told him at last. At least the coldness was gone, but now it sounded even worse: like he was pulling rank on a misbehaving cadet. "That includes Joel. If he's married, he's staying married, end of discussion."

The tone worked about as well as it did on any cadet, too. Sam swallowed, the energy of the moment draining out of him; he didn't reply.

Al only sighed at the lack of response, abruptly wearied. Without another word, he opened the door and stepped back through the rectangle of light.

* * *

 

So he had a few choices.

It wasn't like before, not even close. He wasn't _lying_ to the guy. (Believe it, Al had learned his lesson on how well that tended to go.) But it wasn't like these odds were insignificant, either, and if he couldn't get Sam to see reason, maybe...

Well, it wasn't like he could go and convince Ziggy otherwise, either. And that left Joel, and the slim chance he'd remember anything about this once Sam leaped out of his life and Joel slipped back into place. So all he had to do was go in there, present his case in a calm and rational way, and not say anything like --

"Do you love her?"

"Say what?" said Joel in Sam's voice, moving like he was too big for Sam's body, squinting up at Al with Sam Beckett's eyes.

"Annabelle." He kept as still as a statue, like it would help combat the less-than-suave words that kept spilling out of his mouth. "Do you love her?"

"Why the hell should that matter?"

He thought, _if this were any other time or place,_ and he said -- snapped, nearly -- "What do you mean why should that -- if I was on the verge of breaking up my marriage over that you can damn well believe it'd matter!"

Joel's eyebrows nearly shot up to his hairline. Slowly, "You honestly think that's what I meant."

"Yeah, I think that's what you meant!" Oh, this was going to be some good archival footage. In a distant back corner of his brain, it startled Al a little, the extent to which he didn't care about that. "What else could you mean by that? You're writing long love letters to some woman across town who's, what, probably half your age, ignoring the fact that you've already got a woman who loves you right across the _room_ from you."

Joel's jaw set. "Son, you've got no business in lecturing me about my personal affairs."

_Affairs._ Nice choice of words; Al scoffed and went on, "Yeah? Because no matter how you might have conducted yourself while you were on duty, kid, saving lives doesn't mean you get whatever you want afterward, it doesn't make a damn _difference_. You don't get to flaunt the rules however you want. You're no more important than anybody else, so why do you think that you can get everything? Huh?"

For a few seconds that stretched long and thin like their own little time experiment, neither of them moved or spoke. In that gap, Al realized that somewhere between the first sentence and the last, he'd stopped trying to see past the aura of Sam Beckett; he grasped for breath, and only found it by looking away.

"I saved Annabelle Chase's life twenty years ago," came Sam's -- Joel's -- voice, rising up to fill the empty space, as chilled as the air around them. "She was one of the victims in the Marsh arson attacks. We kept in touch afterward in a perfectly innocent correspondence that my wife's unfortunately misconstrued lately, which is something we've been talking through on our own."

Al looked up. Joel went on, "You've got no business prying into my personal life the way you all have been doing from the start. Especially not my marriage. And you have _no_ damn right to accuse me of cheating on Marian and questioning how much I love her. Is that clear?"

Al huffed another harsh breath. "Yeah," he said. "Got it."

Joel folded his arms. (_His_ arms, Al reminded himself. Not Sam's.) He didn't say a word. Al finally broke the silence.

"Life's really kind of an unfair bitch, huh," he said.

Joel snorted. "If you haven't figured that out by now, Mr. Al, you're in an even sorrier state than I thought."

He laughed, barely audible and far too bleak. _I'm gonna have to work on that before I go back out in the field,_ he thought. "Yeah. You've just got to wonder," he said, shaking his head, looking away again. "If God or Fate or whatever's really running this show, what the hell you did to piss them off sometimes."

Joel didn't answer; not that Al expected him to. As he wrenched his thoughts back on track, he looked over again and asked him, "So her last name's Chase."

Suspicious, Joel squinted at him. "Yeah. Why?"

Chase. Chase. As he continued reeling himself in, Al tried to recall where he'd seen the name before -- and then it clicked.

The victims list Ziggy had compiled.

"I think I know where Marsh is going to go," he said.

* * *

 

Sam's face was striped with ash by the end of it. He lay gasping for breath off an oxygen tank as the rest of the firefighters struggled with the blaze, Elizabeth Chase -- Annabelle's daughter -- seated in the next ambulance over, Marian holding her hand and stroking her hair in a soothing, maternal manner.

"And in another ten years, Elizabeth's going to marry a Samson McKinney from Omaha, Nebraska and have two bouncing baby boys with him," Al reported, the smoke from his cigar invisible in the haze.

Sam took the mask away from his mouth long enough to rasp, "And Joel and Marian?"

"Still together and celebrating their silver anniversary next month. Looks like we both got lucky with those odds." Al glanced over to the two women. A little quieter, "You did good, Sam."

Sam quirked a crooked smile. "Thanks."

A beat's worth of comfortable silence settled between them. Then: "Hey, Sam?" asked Al.

He looked up. "Yeah?"

Al thought of how he could possibly phrase it. _I don't just mean this leap,_ he wanted to say; maybe _I was being an idiot before,_ or he could settle for the cryptic and far too sappy _I forgive you._

Or he could keep on keeping his mouth shut, and think it, and content himself with knowing that between all the Swiss-cheesing and the other things Sam needed to spend more time worrying about, it would be enough.

"See you soon," he said, and let the light of the next leap overtake them.


End file.
